The Boy and the Heron

“Where death comes to an end, life finds a new beginning.”

In the middle of the Second World War, a boy named Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki) leaves Tokyo for a country house belonging to Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura), his new stepmother, who looks a great deal like the mother he lost. A gray heron (Masaki Suda) keeps turning up to taunt him and calls him the long-awaited one. Hayao Miyazaki builds the story around a boy deciding how to live with a grief he can't set down.